PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. — British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Glen Perrett was careful to tell the jurors that a real-world trial is nothing like those portrayed on television, “not a smooth chronological narrative from beginning to end,” and right he is.

But if the judge prepared them for the bumps and detours of the Canadian justice system, the horrors allegedly dispensed by Cody Alan Legebokoff upon the women of this logging city in northern British Columbia nonetheless could have come straight from a mélange of Criminal Minds episodes.

Now 24, Mr. Legebokoff is from nearby Fort St. James but had been living and working for a car dealership in Prince George, a city of about 70,000 people 780 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

He is pleading not guilty to the murders of three adult women and a legally blind teenager over the course of about a year.

As laid out by Crown prosecutor Joseph Temple in his opening statement here Monday, Mr. Legebokoff is alleged to have begun killing when he was just 19 and to have been a killer of exceptional viciousness, who variously beat and stabbed his victims with a variety of tools — including a pickaxe, a pipe wrench and a utility tool — and who may even have stomped upon the neck of one.

The adult victims — Natasha Montgomery, 23, and Jill Stacey Stuchenko and Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35 — were vulnerable women from the margins of this city, cocaine users who sometimes worked in the sex trade to get money for drugs.

One of them, Ms. Montgomery, had just recently been released from jail. She was free only 12 days before she was last seen alive.

Mr. Legebokoff was charged in these three deaths — linked it appears by DNA, even to Ms. Montgomery, whose body has never been found — only after his arrest on Nov. 27, 2010, in the slaying of Ms. Leslie, a high-school student he met just weeks earlier online on the Nexopia social media site for young people.

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If convicted at the end of a trial that may last six to eight months, he would be the youngest serial killer in Canada.

No longer possessed of the mop of blonde curls which had him four years ago described as a fresh-faced boy-next-door, Mr. Legebokoff now sports a shaved head and some decorative facial hair. He still looks young, his skin very pale against the dark suit he wore, and was alert and interested in court.

When he was arrested — his pickup truck was spotted speeding and stopped as it left a logging road by an alert RCMP officer, Constable Aaron Kehler — the boy-next-door was dappled with blood.

The officer noticed a smear of it on his chin, drops on his legs (Mr. Legebokoff was wearing shorts, what turned out to be, according to the DNA evidence, his killing shorts), and a reddish puddle of it on the floor mat.

But, the prosecutor said, he told Const. Kehler “a story about poaching deer.”

Yet when the officer looked in the truck, after arresting Mr. Legebokoff for a poaching offence, he found a backpack in the shape of a monkey head and a pipe wrench “wet with snow and blood.”

The Mountie called in a conservation officer, who followed the truck tracks, then the footprints in fresh snow which came after them, and discovered the body of 15-year-old Loren Leslie, her pants at her ankles, her hair matted with blood.

Over the next two days, Mr. Legebokoff gave five separate statements to the RCMP, Mr. Temple said.

In the first, Mr. Legebokoff denied hurting Ms. Leslie, but admitted seeing her body and even touching her. With blood on him now, he said, he got scared and fled the scene, grabbing the teen’s backpack and phone in his panic.

In the second, he said nothing new.

But in the third statement, he said not only that he didn’t kill Ms. Leslie, but also that she effectively had killed herself.

“The bitch went f—— psycho,” he told the police, stabbing herself in the throat.

He acknowledged watching “her dying for some minutes … and did not offer help,” Mr. Temple told the jurors, telling the police he “was stunned.”

In the fourth statement, Mr. Temple said, Mr. Legebokoff admitted to twice having had sex with Ms. Leslie — the very girl who in a text message hours earlier reminded him “we’re just hanging out, right? Nothing sexual” — and when the police expressed skepticism at his claim that Ms. Leslie had inflicted her own injuries, Mr. Legebokoff insisted she had even smacked herself in the side of the head with the wrench several times.

RCMP handout

For the fifth statement, his girlfriend was brought in to visit him.

He admitted to her that he’d had sex with Ms. Leslie “and that’s when she started to go crazy, hitting herself with the wrench” and stabbing herself in the throat.

But, he told the girlfriend, “I did put her out of her misery” by whacking her in the head “maximum two times.”

The first of the women to die was Ms. Stuchenko, whose badly decomposed body was found Oct. 26, 2009, half-buried in a gravel pit on the outskirts of the city. She died of a head injury and skull fracture, her face, arms, legs and anus covered in bruising.

Ms. Maas’s body was found Oct. 9, 2010, in a city park. Her pants were at her knees and she had suffered both blunt trauma and penetrating wounds to the chest. Several ribs were fractured, bones in her neck and cheekbone were fractured, and two fingers broken.

Ms. Montgomery was last seen alive Aug. 31, 2010, reported missing that September. Though her remains haven’t been found, Mr. Temple said forensic tests on the shorts Mr. Legebokoff was wearing on the night of his arrest contained her DNA in bloodstains.

Ms. Montgomery’s DNA was also found on his hooded sweatshirt, in deposits on his bedsheets and in stains on the walls, floor, curtains and bathmat of his apartment.

Listening stoically to this summary of the evidence to come were relatives and friends of the four, three women and a girl, the former worn by life, the latter naïve: It didn’t seem to matter.

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